Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

ONLY THE LONELYRussell Banks’ latest novel, Lost Memory of Skin, has an unexpected protagonist. The Kid, a convicted sex offender, camps out under a causeway in Florida. Laws stipulate that he must stay away from places where children congregate. A victim of his own instincts, young and a bit naïve, the Kid leads a shiftless existence with other homeless men. His life takes an unexpected...

The secrets of an American underpass

After a melodramatic and somewhat disappointing detour to the 1930s in his last novel, The Reserve, Russell Banks has returned with intensity to the territory he staked out for himself in novels like Continental Drift and Affliction—the gritty reality of America’s underclass.Beneath a south Florida causeway, a small band of paroled sex offenders have been consigned to an abysmal...

Trouble in a mountain paradise

Class and politics, lust and art, ego and madness—all are grand themes in literature, and all play a part in Russell Banks' new novel, The Reserve, set in the Adirondacks in the 1930s. The Tamarack Reserve, a secluded enclave of faux-rustic cabins on remote lakes in the mountains, is a painful microcosm of the haves and have-nots of the era—specifically the rich part-time...

Free radical

A third of the way into Russell Banks' powerful new novel, The Darling, Hannah Musgrave travels to a remote tribal village in Liberia to meet the family of Woodrow Sundiata. This is in the mid-1970s, and Hannah, the daughter of a prominent, liberally active American doctor and writer, is hiding out in West Africa under an assumed name, fleeing...

Resonant fact-based fiction

reated in Cloudsplitter an immediate landmark in American fiction: lyricism that explores the unspoken complexities of the long history of relationships between whites and blacks, as well as storytelling that reveals the twisted truths of the ambiguous kinship of any father and son.